Just noticed the deal that is going to bring rebol to
millions of
computers out there. Cool, hopes it works.

The net

The wireless network has been working great up until friday
evening. All of a sudden I couldn't get an IP address
through DHCP. My
computer just stood there and waited and waited. I took my
laptop with
me and roamed the campus trying to find an access point that
would
give me an IP address. Found one just around the corner, but
the DNS
server was not functioning properly so I couldn't access the VPN
gateway. Luckily I had a log somewhere which revealed the IP
address
and finally I could read my mail... but not at home, only on a
freezing bench at Berliner Platz (here in Karlsruhe). It
must have
looked waaay geeky, seeing me there with my laptop. Cold is
something
the screen of my laptop doesn't like. Or at least not when I
use X. In
console mode everything is ok, but in X, the screen goes
completely
blank every other minute when I am outside. Weird.

I did find a reasonable solution. I can access Internet if I
have the
antenna on my balcon, but then I can't close the door
completely, and
I don't know how well the antenna is doing. It's an indoor
antenna but
hopefully it won't die on me. If I can't get the net working
properly
I have to ditch the local network here in the apartment,
which my
housemates have been looking forward to. I read an article
here on Advogato which lead me to the smoothwall project. It
may just be what we need.

School

I gave up the lab course Mobile Communications. It was fun,
but took
too much time. And I already have two other lab courses
(Compiler
Construction and Speech Recognition).

In Compiler Construction lab course we are making a minijava
compiler
in Eli.
It took a while before I got the hang of Eli, but know all
pieces are
starting to fit. As it is free, I really should look into it
more and
get it working on my laptop.

In the Speech Recognition lab course, we are making a
Klingon Speech
Recognizer (or are going to). Did I tell you I am a Star
Trek fan? :)
Up until now, it have mostly consisted of learning a
tcl-language.

Have been here for three weeks now. My German is slowly
coming back to me. I've studied German for seven years (from
age 13 to 20), but have also had three years of forgetting.
My brain has begun to think in German, which makes it really
hard for me to write this diary entry, because I had to
reboot into English mode. :) No problem with my Swedish
though. I've also met three Swedes down here, two girls that
works in a pub nearby, and one male student, but I've heard
there are some more.

I have been searching for a place to stay so I haven't
followed the news much lately, neither computer news or
normal. But I somehow heard of this Anthrax disease in
Florida, and wondered what the band's statement was, and
today I found it.

Before the tragedy of September 11th the only thing scary
about Anthrax was our bad hair in the 80's and the "Fistful
Of Metal" album cover. Most people associated the name
Anthrax with the band, not the germ. Now in the wake of
those events, our name symbolizes fear, paranoia and death.
Suddenly our name is not so cool.

Money

Now I have to go to the bank and pay a bill. I bought a
wireless network card, Dell TrueMobile 1150, and an antenna,
Elsa Airlancer Extender. Works great under Linux. It's
actually just a Orinoco card in disguise. It was pretty
cheap, 279DM (+ 179DM for the antenna), but the rent is high
as hell. I shouldn't complain though. I live exactly by the
university, in fact, looking out of the window where I am
sitting right now, I see the main building with the sign
"Technische Hochschule". And as I live so close to the
university, I have access to the wireless network.

I wonder how much this year is going to cost. It's going to
be scary for sure. But by next year, the currency changes,
so everything will cost half as much, but in Euro. :)

It's almost unbelievable how many people there are
that read
that site. The
Shakespeare Programming Language that I and my friend
Kalle wrote as an assignment in a syntactical analysis
course got slashdotted.
The student web server, where we had our homepage, died in
perhaps 10 minutes after the article appeared on slashdot's
front page. We redirected the traffic to another
web server and just put up a temporary web page. In under 24
hours we had gotten 300 000 unique visitors according to the
access log. Pretty cool. I tried to describe to my father
that I just had some fifteen minutes of geek fame. He
didn't understand why, but thought it was funny that his son
was an Internet celebrity for fifteen minutes. Now I have
put the web page on sourceforge. Just in case something like
this happens again, at least our student web server won't
die. :)

We also received a perl script that translates
brainfuck to
SPL. It doesn't work quite right though, but when it does,
we can have all those nice brainfuck programs, like DeCSS,
in SPL.

Dear Diary, it has been long since I wrote
something, but
you know... Life, stuff and everything. No hard feelings,
right? OK,
good! I've had some terrible months and some good months.
And there
has been nothing in between. April was a bad one, I had too
much to do
but no time to do it. School and work occupied most of time.
May was
good. We finished our strategy game Gecco. June good as
well. I met a
girl from Italy AND a girl from Gothenburg. Confused but
happy. July
bad, the girl from Italy went home, to Italy, and I lost
connection
with Gothenburg girl. August good. I and Kalle finished our
Shakespeare Programming Language.

During the winter and spring I had a course called
Program
Development Project (translated roughly). We were to create
a general
strategy game which would be used by the decision
support group at Nada. I don't know exactly for what
they were
going to use it, but the Swedish defence research department (FOI) were also interested. We
had some
great ideas, but had a hard time coding the thing, and
although we put
more effort into our project than many other groups, and
even won
the project
competition, it still felt a bit unstable and unfinished when
we left
it. Nada hired my friend Kalle (who was also in the project
group) to
work on it during the summer though and FOI is also working
on it now
so it is probably going to be used for real. The one best
thing about
the whole project though, was that we convinced them to have it
licensed under GPL. We had received some concern from FOI,
but once we
explained the benefits to having it open with GPL, they were
ok with
it. As we retain the copyrights we told them that we could
change the
license for them if it was absolutely necessary, but they
accepted
GPL. I was really surprised at first, because when we
visited them for
a grand tour of their equipment on which the thing
eventually would
run on, everything was very hush hush secret secret. As
the project
changed from a student project to a research project it now
has a new official
homepage

It's finally finished. I and Kalle have spent way too
much
time on
this assignment but it was worth it. The meaning of the
exercise was
to show that we could handle both syntactical and lexical
analysis of
some sort. Make a pretty printer syntax highlighting for
Java code or
similiar. We decided to make our own language instead, after
having
seen some very funny esoteric languages out there. (Chef,
Sorted, etc.)

After several months we finally have an
implementation of the
language. The main purpose of it is to have its source code
resemble a
Shakespeare play. Not a real play, but more how it's built.
Character
declaration at the top, acts, scenes, people entering and
exiting, and
saying stuff to other people. We also added some stacks to have
infinite memory space, which makes it Turing complete,
although we
haven't made real proof yet. Although Hello
World is quite big, it was very easy using the stacks to
write a
program which reads from stdin and outputs it backwards on
stdout.

Germany

I am going to study a year at Karlsruhe University in
Germany. I am
leaving Sweden the last week of September and I am very
excited but
also very nervous. I still haven't found any place to stay. I
received an e-mail from a guy that said he wanted to rent me
a room
but I haven't heard from him in one week so perhaps he has
bailed
out. I guess there is no chance that someone reading this,
is from
Karlsruhe, who can help me with accomodation. If there are,
you can have a
Swedish computer geek as a room mate. What about that!? :)

other random stuff

Cool WikiFeature
gary. This will give all those Wiki diaries out there a
nicer interface :)

I haven't used my Amiga in ages. Is this goodbye?
Yes,
probably. But I'll buy the AmigaDE and try it out some time.

After using it for some months, I've become
addicted to
Ion.
It's a
window manager who takes care of the windows for you. It
clashes with
some programs because of different views of concept, but
still, it's
not hard
to use for example Gimp, even though it follows the
manymanymany
small windows everywhere shadowing each other concept

I have been reading the article 'Best
Practices' for Open Source ?. All things pointed out are
good to
think about, but sometimes you can't hear yourself think
when everyone
is preaching about their software methodology. All these top
down
ideas are good and all, especially when it comes to handling big
projects, but even the biggest project is built up with
small parts
and if you don't know how to build them, you are screwed. I
am feeling
very uncomfortable when I start a project knowing all the
ideas and
concepts by heart but have no experience in how to implement
them.
The first implementation usually sucks and if I redo it, it will
without doubt be better than the first. The problem is that
I don't
always have the time, and when I do, I am usually too lazy
to care
about a reimplementation. I am always in a hurry to get
stuck in a new
problem, even if I have not managed to get out of the last one.

I think I have a solution to my problems. Watch less tv,
read more
books. :) This weekend I watched Dune - the
miniseries. 3
episodes which lasted 4 and a half hours, spanning through
the first
book from Frank Herbert's Dune saga. I enjoyed every minute
of it, but
a friend of mine, almost fell asleep during the first
episode so he
left. Perhaps it was the lack of action. Although this is
the future,
they have cool weapons and everyone wants to kill eachother, the
miniseries is as slow as the book. I was a little bit put
off by the
CGI, it could have been done nicer, especially since some of it
doesn't even match the effects of the last Dune film, made
1984. You
start to realize that it always takes great artists, no
matter how
powerful computers you have, to make something look good.
All in all,
a nice distraction from reality.

Aaaah, the preview of your diary entry really should be
saved so that
you can access it later if your browser somehow dies or if
you
reflow-paragraph-with-meta-q-oh-shit-I-am-using-Netscape it
to death,
like I just did. Well anyway...

Gran Marnier

Ok, yesterday I finally dared to possibly set the
kitchen on
fire by
making flambéed crêpes. I invited my best friend Kalle to
join me for
an evening meal at ten, or actually counted on him to come
because he
had the Gran Marnier. He made the pancakes and I lit them on
fire. The
alcohol of the orange liqueur had a very blue flame and was
a nice
colour change in my other so dull kitchen which I share with
eleven
other people. The one's who entered to make a sandwich or
something
like that also thought that it was cool, but definately
overkill. We
didn't agree. It was well worth the effort. The nicest and
most fun
meal I've had in a long time. We stayed up late, drank Glögg
and I
showed Kalle this site and some programming tricks and other
stuff
I've learnt by spending so many hours in front of the
computer
instead of
sleeping. When he left, I fell asleep instantly. :)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Had a really nice evening today too, with Lykke. Both I
and
she liked
the film. There were many beautiful details, not just
beautiful fighting/flying. I especially like the scene where
Jen not
just pointed
but literally shot an arrow through Lo's heart. The ignition
of
love. How can you not love someone who has just touched your
heart
(and previously struck your head with a big rock). :-)

PalmOS

Although I am in a state of happiness, I am bound to be
miserable any
time soon. I have neglecting programming although I have
much to do. I
feel my life at the moment is turning into a simple
non-deterministic
automata without accepting states.

|
crêpes and movies
|
(q0, Good) -- school and work --> (q1, Bad)
|
'-- school and work --> (q2, Good)

With previous jobs I've had a time limit. Do as much as
you
can, write
good code, leave the source to us and we will do the rest!
As I dive
through my friends' troubles with their employers I am
coming to the
conclusion that I've been lucky. The work I am doing now,
this is how
work really is. Although I know how to write nice PalmOS
code, I've
never done anything this big before. Too bad it's very
unfree
software. I am wading through NDA's. Well, enough ranting.
Now
it's time for Lexx

Why do things you throw come back to you? I really
had
to
clean my apartment today. I actually still have to. :-) I
roamed my little room and found useless paper, more useless
paper, some plastic things I've been chewing on, more
plastic things from nowhere, recipe for Crepes Suzette. Ooh,
great. I have to make these some day otherwise I wouldn't
have saved it. Why should I save it? If I really want
to do crepes some day I'd rather ask my dad or search on the
Internet for the recipe than search for this little
note. So I tossed it into the bin. Didn't even write the
recipe down on my Palm. After a full hour of cleaning I got
so bored that I had to sit down and relax, and one of the
most relaxing things I know is to start my web browser and
read something, like diary entries on Advogato. I
personally like reading hacker's entries. He's way more
busy than me, but somehow find the time to complete his
tasks and write nice and long diary entries. Today I found
myself into WikiWikiWeb
through one of Nutella's entries. I actually
didn't read it but I saw the wiki link. I am always confused
in wikispace but after some clicking I found myself to a
page describing Richard Stallman and his relationship with
James Gosling. Twenty seconds later I was on Sun's domains
and noticed that James is big fan of cooking AND
THERE IT WAS, the recipe for Crepes Suzette that I just
minutes ago had thrown away. Ok, so I am not a guy that
can't take a hint: I will make Crepes Suzette some day. If
you smell something burning in Stockholm in the next couple
of days you know what it is.

After christmas I will help a friend on his photon
tracer. I
am already looking forward to it. Hopefully it will be
something that can be realeased, although now it's just a
test project to learn about photon tracing. I think the goal
is to be able to render a grainy sphere by the end of
January

Lucia

Today it's Lucia, (Big Swedish tradition, looks
like this, sounds
like this). Lucia is surrounded by photons, with all her
candles in her hair. She would be a good model for the
tracer. :) I hope I will see a Lucia train just by
accident today, because I don't have time for anything but
school.
</blockquote>

code

I have not written a single line of code for my own
projects
in weeks. It's really annoying, because up until now I've
had lots of free time to spend. Somehow I always end up in
front of the TV. I must have been infected with a
lazy-tv-viewing-virus. Help someone! Is there a easy cure?

Found some nice comments on the The Meta: Abused Trust?
article. I am an apprentice here on Advogato, but as ZachGarner points out, there
is no real apprentiship on Advogato. I guess it wasn't
raph's intentions to provide one in the first place, but it
would be nice to see one. The idea of subcommunitys with
group discussions, information sharing with the compulsary
links collection on Advogato also sounds nice, although a
good mailing list just might do the trick. The real trick is
however to find your way into such a "subcommunity". The
bulletproof way is revealed by
ncm further down

"Showing code" is all it takes to vault
straight to the top.

Perhaps it takes a little more effort than
that, but it will give you a good jump start. A proof to
people will get them interested. Then they might be willing
to guide you all the way to the top. And when you are
finally there. Look down and pick up some more people.

But anyway, who am I to tell. I haven't revealed
anything
yet. Hello! Can you see me down here, I'm the little
green thing running around in circles? ;-)